


Blue, Red, and Bleached

by GalaxyGazing



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: Bisexuality, Drug Dealing, F/M, M/M, Origin Story, Original Character(s), Timelines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-14 04:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1252198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyGazing/pseuds/GalaxyGazing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A segmented speculation on how Graverobber earned his name and ultimately survived the city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue, Red, and Bleached

_"I started out with nothing and still have most of it left." - Unknown._

 

-

 

  
  
The year was 2003 and the failure rate of organs was astounding.  
  
Chase, thirteen, held the hand of his father and literally watched the life fade from his eyes.  
  
He couldn’t even cry. He had used up all his distress and tears sobbing over his mother who had died not one week earlier.  
  
The death of his only remaining family had come much too soon. It couldn’t knock him down again because he had not yet been able to stand up from the reeling shock of the first.  
  
Absolutely numb, he swallowed hard, nodded, and told his father quietly to  _go find mom_.  
  
He knew he couldn’t stay here. ‘House’ was too generous a term to call the rundown compilation of wood in which his family had been staying. It was not far off from collapsing itself, just like its inhabitants.  
  
The entire town was a graveyard.  
  
Chase took the remaining food: a loaf of bread, two apples, some old cheese, and water.  
  
He was city-bound.

 

 

-

 

 

The buildings were tall and the sky was dark. It was a collage of industry, technology, and smog from businesses.  
  
There was death here, too. There was death everywhere nowadays, it seemed. But here, at least, the population was slightly larger, enough so that people still walked the streets.  
  
The walk had taken four days. Chase collapsed, leaning against the brick wall of an alleyway.  
  
All he had left to consume was the water which he had tried to ration. He drank it but his stomach was so empty that is only pained him when the liquid hit his insides.  
  
When he gathered himself, he decided to walk by some of the shops. A few were closed due to their owner’s recent deaths. One still open was a bakery.  
  
Chase walked in and asked if they had any scraps or stale bread that he could have.  
  
The answer was no.  
  
The answer was no at the next store, too.  
  
His mother died of heart failure. His father died of kidney failure. Chase hoped, for a moment, that he had inherited one of these conditions and wouldn’t have to deal with this life for too much longer.

 

 

-

 

 

A week had passed since he arrived in the city. Everyone was too occupied with their own problems to help him.  
  
Seven days and eight nights of back alley roads for beds and dumpster diving for food had Chase in a constant state of discomfort.  
  
Dogs will start to dig if they know they are dying. Similarly, Chase found that his feet had led him instinctively to the city’s cemetery.  
  
It was close to six in the morning. His sleep schedule had been off for days.  
  
He found a tombstone and laid against it after asking the resident,  _Charlene A. Walters, Loving Mother_ , if he could sit with her for a while. His own voice sounded foreign to his own ears, having not used it for quite some time.  
  
The gray glow of twilight revealed that it was coming up on his third day without water. He was lethargic and dirty and nothing seemed more inviting than lying down.  
  
Perhaps he would stay with Charlene more than just a while.  
  
He closed his eyes and considered never opening them again, but did so when he heard a metallic sound crunching into the hard earth before his feet.  
  
Looking up, he saw a man leaning against the handle of a long shovel, staring down at him: the outline of a strange angel silhouetted in the awkward twilight.  
  
“You alive, kid?”  
  
The answer was almost no but the man had been carrying a full canteen and jerky he was willing to share.

 

 

-

 

 

If you squeezed behind the dumpster in the back alley of the feeble strip mall, there was a small hole in the brick wall that would lead you into the sanctuary of an abandoned hat stop, boarded up from the front.  
  
Inside was a make-shift home: old mattresses on the floor, ratty blankets, boxes of nonperishables, a bucket which caught the fresh water when the rain leaked through a hole in the roof, old hat stands tipped over on a cement floor.  
  
It was the most beautiful place Chase had ever seen.  
  
He was led over to a mattress in the corner by the man who had found him that morning—Ivan, he said his name was.  
  
“About six or seven us live here. You can stay as long as you help provide. A different person brings back food every day of the week. It’s always dark in here, we can’t light any fires because someone might see the light through the cracks and discover us. Anything you want for comfort you have to collect yourself, but you’re lucky because Garfield just died so you can have his mattress.”  
  
Two other people were present, both sleeping. Chase noted that they, like Ivan, had multi-colored hair. He wondered about this but his attention was promptly given to the bag of hard pretzels Ivan offered to him.

 

 

-

 

 

It was close to six in the morning once again when Chase left the shelter of the hat shop. He followed Ivan’s footsteps closely. No one was anywhere in sight.  
  
They were in the city graveyard once again, exactly where they had met yesterday.  
  
“This is the best time to do it. If you go around two or three, those are the hours when the cops think you’ll be sneaky. No one thinks you’ll go right before dawn, when it’s brightest.”  
  
Today, Ivan would show Chase how he was going to earn his keep and contribute to the home.  
  
The shovel hit the earth with a hard noise.  
  
“This is the best graveyard to do it in because it’s the newest in the city,” Ivan explained while he worked, “About three years back they started diggin’ em shallower because people were dying left and right they didn’t have the time to dig the full six feet if they were going to keep up. These are only about four.”  
  
Ivan was twenty-three, ten years older than Chase. He was tall, thin, and angular. Under the tattered clothes, dirt, and sweat he had nice features; professional-looking features. Chase thought he looked like a man who would be on a billboard encouraging stock investments if circumstances had turned out differently. Instead, his dark hair was unkempt with dye in it.  
  
Chase knew he couldn’t look like any prize either. He couldn’t even remember the last time that water had been abundant enough to have the luxury of a bath. His own hair was matted and wild around his face. After twenty minutes or so, the shovel hit something that made a low, hollow noise. He used the tool to bust out the nails of the coffin. Ivan jumped down into the plot.  
  
“Watch closely,” Ivan told him, pulling out a syringe and placing it up the corpse’s deteriorated nose.  
  
The glow of the blue extraction was bright enough to illuminate their faces in the dark of the world.

 

 

-

 

 

The average corpse produced one to two ounces of a powerful and highly addictive anesthetic that the household had labeled "Escape."

The best corpses to drain were ones that had been dead less than ten years; any later and the corpse would be too bone dry to extract from.  
  
Chase was learning to read the dates on headstones.  
  
When one of the other inhabitants of the hat shop found him his own syringe, Chase felt like he was officially part of a family again. He was the youngest of seven and everyone was friendly enough to him.  
  
Six months passed and Chase turned fourteen. Up until then, he had been doing his runs with Ivan, learning the ropes like:  
  
-The weakest spots on different types of coffins.  
  
-How to cut a rectangular layer of grass off of the grave before you start, to be replaced without suspicion when it was refilled.  
  
-How to carve a tiny “E” into the headstone with a nail before you leave to mark which graves you had already visited.  
  
-How to hide the bottle in your coat so the glow wouldn't give you away in the streets.  
  
But upon his birthday, it was decided that he now knew enough to collect on his own.  
  
That night, Chase struck gold and scored a full two ounces. Beginners luck, maybe.  
  
Ivan patted him on the back and his approval was more satisfying than the success of the endeavor.  
  
As a bonus, it rained that night for the first time in weeks and everyone ran out to take a shower.

 

 

-

 

 

When Chase turned fifteen, Ivan decided he was now old enough to start dealing. Prior to this, any collection Chase had made was delivered to Ivan who would sell it to various clients and give Chase the money when he returned.  
  
“Never sell an ounce for less than ten pieces. If a buyer tells you they only have nine, no deal, there are plenty of people in this city who will pay ten. In a two and a half inch bottle with a half inch girth, like this one, every eighth of an inch is another gold piece, so use your better judgment for pricing. If it’s close, overprice rather than underprice. For a full two ounces we charge twenty.”  
  
Chase listened as Ivan talked, doing the math in his head. For all he'd known, Ivan could have been giving him half the money he had actually earned when he dealt for him, but hearing the hard values now informed him that Ivan had always been honest.  
  
“I’m going to start you off with a girl named Victoria. She’s been pretty constant with her payments, shouldn’t give you any problems. Here is the address and time when I meet her.”  
  
The time on the card was six hours from now. While they waited, Ivan prepared Chase in another way. The bowl smelled a little sharper than vinegar as he mixed the liquid inside of it with a popsicle stick.  
  
Chase sat with his back to Ivan, who ran his fingers through his hair to untangle it a bit; he hadn’t cut it since he had left home and it was now touching his shoulders.  
  
Ivan put on some old gloves and began to work.  
  
“Blue means that you sell Escape. Red means you will accept sex as payment. Bleached means you’ve been in the business more than five years.”  
  
Chase’s hair was only streaked blue for today.  
  
Ivan’s hair had always been dyed all three.

 

 

-

 

 

By sixteen, Chase had mastered the art of obtaining and dealing Escape. He had even collected some new clients for the household to use.  
  
Over the past two and a half years, many of the hat store residents had come and gone. Some were arrested, some died, some moved on to new cities. Ivan and Chase were now the two who had lived there the longest.  
  
Some of the new residents were recruited by Ivan, in the same way that Chase had been. Ivan cared for them in a similar manner but Chase was his best friend, he had been the first one Ivan had taken in.  
  
The year was 2006 and a new company had just blossomed, right in the center of the city.  
  
GeneCo, the company was called. Their advertisements promised a solution to the organ epidemic.  
  
Its great, dark spires were erected into the dirty sky like a castle made of metal and promise for the future.

 

 

-

 

 

 **GeneCo Presents Zydrate** **  
**  
The floating advertisement read. Ivan and Chase had a good laugh.  
  
The company laid claims to having discovered it, but the little glass vial of blue liquid that the friendly-looking nurse offered on the billboard looked amazingly like their main source of income for the past four years.  
  
As a joke, the two started calling it Zydrate as well, but it actually ended up aiding them immensely when new clients understood that what they were selling was the same thing being advertised around the city.  
  
Their clients tripled when GeneCo started marketing surgeries like accessories and, what do you know, Zydrate was the perfect remedy for the pain of the knife.  
  
On one night when the moon was a sliver, a teenaged girl saw Chase’s blue hair and wanted to make a transaction.  
  
“Hey,  _Graverobber_ ,” she snapped at him boldly, like he was a servant. Chase jolted at the label, whipping his head around to make sure no cops had been passing by.  
  
The girl wanted surgery for a new face which her father would not help pay for.  
  
According to her, he was spiting her for changing her last name from his to Sweet.

 

 

-

 

 

Graverobber was seventeen when he added red dye to his hair. Apparently, Amber was willing to pay for Zydrate is other ways.  
  
Income was now abundant enough that he could accept sex as occasional payment without having to worry about making enough to pay for food.  
  
The night he lost his virginity he came home frazzled and Ivan gave him a knowing, lopsided smirk.

 

 

-

 

  
  
GeneCo had only been in business a year, but people from all corners of the world had flocked to the city in hopes of purchasing a cure for their failing bodies.  
  
The city was becoming so crowded that it could no longer afford to waste space on empty buildings. One night, when Graverobber was out dealing, the city’s police gassed everyone out of the hat shop.  
  
He returned to find the dumpster pushed aside and gray mist filtering out of the hole in the wall, which was boarded up with yellow POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape. Two cops were around the front of the building, guarding it.  
  
Disoriented, he rounded alley corners and exited the towering forest of buildings until he reached the open air of the graveyard. Somehow, he just knew.  
  
He found Ivan leaning against a headstone, in the same place Ivan had found him dying five years ago. His shirt was shining black at the shoulder and Graverobber realized he had been shot.  
  
“Ivan! Ivan, are you okay, what happened?”  
  
“I’m fine, I’m fine. Police kicked us out, took all our stuff. I’m sorry, I know there were probably some things in there that you wanted to save but I didn’t have time to grab much."  
  
“Fuck that, I don’t care about any of that stuff. Your arm—“  
  
“I’m fine, really,” Ivan hissed through clenched teeth, “The bullet didn’t even go in, just grazed me.”  
  
“Does it hurt?”

“Nope,” Ivan coughed an ironic laugh, squinting his eyes tight.  
  
“Shit, hold on,” Graverobber said, digging through his bag.  
  
Syringes had been phased out of use for anything other than extracting. To apply, one now used a nifty Zydrate Gun, developed by GeneCo. It caused the anesthetic to spark, making it take effect instantly, as opposed injecting which took fifteen minutes to work it into your system.  
  
Graverobber had secured a Zydrate gun from an unguarded dumpster one day and grabbed for it now, loading it with the vial.  
  
“No,” Ivan said, breath hitched.  
  
“What do you mean  _no?_ This will help take the pain away.”  
  
“You don’t use if you deal, Chase. I mean, fuck, what if I got addicted to this stuff? And I know how to get it whenever I want! Do you see what a slippery slope that is?”  
  
“Just this one time.”

“I said no,” Ivan whispered.  
  
Graverobber locked eyes with him, trying to pierce some sense through his stubbornness, but Ivan just smiled at him tiredly until Graverobber gave in with a frustrated groan.  
  
Tearing off several strips of his own sleeve, he tied a tight bandage around Ivan’s arm.  
  
Ivan slept in the graveyard that night while Graverobber stood watch, placing the back of his hand a few inches in front of his nose every five minutes for the first hour until Ivan groaned without opening his eyes,  
  
“I’m not going to die, Chase, you can stop doing that.”

 

 

-

 

 

GeneCo recently passed a law that made organ repossessions legal.  
  
All the hope and promise they represented when they were formed spiraled down the drain, revealing their true interests.  
  
People now died not from lack of health, but lack of wealth.  
  
But as disappointing as the repossession law was, what truly hindered Graverobber was the law which stated that Zydrate administers must be licensed and registered.  
  
Before, all they had to worry about was being caught for the act of plundering graves, but now they could be killed on sight for illegal drug possession. Cops knew what to look for now, and knew where to look.  
  
Neither Graverobber nor Ivan ever reunited with any of their other housemates after they were gassed out. They hadn’t seen them anywhere, which made them assume the worst.  
  
Truthfully, the only reason Graverobber believed he hadn’t been caught was the fact that the daughter of GeneCo’s founder was a regular client.  
  
The two dealers lived like nomads around the city, sleeping in a different spot each night. One time, Graverobber even embraced the vagabond cliché of dozing in a dumpster.  
  
Sometimes, though, they were lucky, and would break into the house of a recent repo victim, which would be empty for a week or so before anyone would notice.

His long hair was still dripping wet from the hot shower he had just taken and his stomach was full from the food that was in the fridge—a wonderful sensation which convinced him that if there was a Heaven, it couldn’t be any more complicated than a buffet line.  
  
Graverobber laid down on the plush bed. It felt nice to have something other than jagged pavement or trash beneath him. Also, on the rare occasion that he was in a bed, it was much easier to coax Ivan into sleeping with him.  
  
He tried to enjoy these moments while they lasted because this was about as good as it ever got.  
  
Ivan followed a similar pattern of settling in, entering the bedroom with no shirt on so Graverobber could see the scar from the bullet wound on his shoulder.  
  
“Scissors,” Ivan sighed in satisfaction, holding them up for Graverobber to see. He then turned to face the dresser mirror and cut his hair short.  
  
An old barber’s blade had been their means of shaving their facial hair, always tempting fate with a blunt blade obtained from who-knows-where. It never worked well for cutting hair, however, but no one ever seemed to throw scissors away.  
  
He watched his friend cut his colored hair to a choppy chin length; it reminded him of how Ivan looked when they first met.  
  
Graverobber didn’t cut his own hair that night. He had just applied bleached streaks to it.

 

 

-

 

  
  
A special division of the police squad was assigned the specific task of looking out for Zydrate pilferers. The city's cemeteries were now kept on constant watch.  
  
Graverobber was twenty years old when times became hard again.  
  
Their trusty, go-to graveyard was guarded and locked down, forcing them to resort to older plots—old enough for any descendants of those buried there to have died or moved on long ago, old enough for the corpses to be pushing the bone dry limit. They were less protected because they were less cared about, but the ground was hard and the graves were deep.  
  
Amber grew more and more demanding, throwing gold coins at Graverobber for Zydrate just as fast as he could collect it. With the new security, they could afford to charge more for the illegal anesthetic due to the hoops they had to jump through to get it, but they sold it less frequently so their profit margin didn’t increase at all.  
  
One time Amber didn’t have the cash to pay and became furious with Graverobber when he wouldn’t accept sex as payment that night. She took it personally and vowed to find a new dealer.  
  
He was scared for a while that she would. But the next week she was back. She always came back.

 

  
  
  
-

 

 

With the cops on the hunt for people with their occupations, it was becoming harder and harder for Graverobber and Ivan to stay together. The days of drug dealer community living were over.  
  
Guards were now asking people which deceased family member they were visiting if they wanted to enter a cemetery and pay their respects.  
  
Graverobber looked longingly at the plot he had started out in, all stale and surrounded by gaurds on a hill. He thought for a moment he might remember the name of the headstone he had once leaned against, Charlene something, but it wouldn’t do him any good without a last name.  
  
Ivan was out buying them food. They had to pool their money together to do so now.  
  
Sometimes he wondered why he ever got in.  
  
He wondered why, but never how. The how was easy: he was given shelter, food, comfort, and friendship—that kept him alive.  
  
But what he couldn’t figure out, was  _why_ …why had he kept dealing when the money was good? He had a chance to get out then, but now, at twenty-one, an adult, he was grounded to this place. It was a part of him.  
  
He huddled around the warm flame of a burning trash can fire that night, reading the newspaper and learning of GeneCo’s unrivaled control over the place.  
  
The only thing that hadn’t crumbled around him, leaving him bare and dying and thirteen again was Ivan.

 

 

-

 

 

“I have to get out of this place.”  
  
The whisper was soft and low, mournful but certain. Graverobber jerked his head to look at Ivan who stared blankly ahead into the clutches of the black city as they stood at the edge of it.  
  
He remembered having to crane his neck to look up at him when he was younger, but now he was only a few inches shorter. Graverobber was twenty-two when these words were said to him, only one year younger than Ivan had been when he’d found him.  
  
“What are you talking about?” Graverobber breathed, brow furrowed.  
  
“This place has changed. Security is too high, our jobs are punishable by death on sight, and if we stay together we’re only more conspicuous.”  
  
“We can avoid those guys. We’ve done it for nine years.” But Graverobber heard the own doubt in his voice as he spoke those words. Everything Ivan had said was true.  
  
“I’ve been putting you at risk by hanging around ever since the law was passed. I was selfish for wanting to stay. For wanting to stay with  _you_.”  
  
“Fuck, don’t say that. Fine, then I’m coming with you.”  
  
“No,” Ivan said sternly, turning to look at Graverobber for the first time since the conversation started. His tone was low and warned that there would be no debate about this, “You have it good here. Amber makes sure you don’t get caught. You’ve been the breadwinner for a while now, been dealing more than I have for a long time. This is your city.”  
  
“I don’t care, I still need you with me.”  
  
“No, you don't," Ivan breathed, split into equal parts of sad and proud, "I’ve taught you all that I know and you function fine on your own. In fact, I think you’d function better without me.”  
  
“Shit, Ivan, no.”  
  
“Chase,” The word was a plea for the discussion to end.   
  
No one in this world even knew his real name anymore except for Ivan. That alone was a reminder of all the man had sacrificed for him, how long he had stuck with him, and how much Graverobber owed it to him to let him go now.  
  
Sometimes Graverobber wondered how anything could be so significant, so life-altering that people couldn’t move on. He’d seen both his parents die, escaped death himself, suffered through starvation and homelessness, become a drug dealer, and still he had always pushed through.  
  
But as he watched Ivan start down the road to anywhere, he felt for a moment like he understood.

 

 

-

 

  
  
Graverobber was twenty-three when he found his very own youngster trembling alone in a cemetery.  
  
Funny how things came full circle.  
  
He had learned over the past year that the key to obtaining Zydrate was three words:  
  
_Family owned graveyards._

It appeared that when the city allowed a Repo Man to murder one of your family members, people weren't too keen on having their loved ones rest forever in a plot built by said city. To show good faith, the permits needed to build a graveyard on one's own land were abolished.

With no assigned security, these private tombs were his for the taking. Graverobber had a healthy amount of Z on him at any time and clients flocked to him in throngs. He was back on top.

“Please, I have to get home!” The child yelled.  
  
She apparently had some sort of illness, her blinking medical bracelet indicated.  
  
Graverobber smiled. At least this one had a home to go to. Possibly even a parent that loved her.  
  
When the helicopters flashed blindingly and the cops dropped in, he realized that it was his turn to be the protector now, the guide, the narrator to a story he could already see unfolding.  
  
“This way, kid!”

 

  
  
  
-

 

 

The End.

 


End file.
